190 Chapter Three: Marks of Production, Marks of Commerce
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Chapter Three: Marks of production, marks of commerce: proprietary branding on stone bottles Fig. 3.1, stoneware bottle1 Between 1812 and 1834, Edward Wormald was earning a living as a porter merchant operating within the Harrogate area, alongside four other porter dealers in Knaresborough.2 Although documentary evidence concerning Wormald is slim, his business – or at least his customers – travelled to York, as shown by the bottle fragment illustrated Figure 3.1, uncovered at Hungate.3 Other stoneware bottle fragments excavated at Hungate have revealed that York had a variety of local drinks 1 York Archaeological Trust (hereafter YAT), Project 5000 (Hungate): SF158, ‘stone bottle’ (1817- 1834). 2 Pigot & Co, Directory of Cheshire, Cumberland... 1828-9 (Part II: Notts-Yorks & N Wales), p.995. Pigot’s also lists seven wine and spirit merchants in Knaresborough, but none of either trade are listed for Harrogate. 3 Unfortunately the documentary evidence for Edward Wormald is scant; his marriage and wife’s death are noted in the York Herald in 1829 and 1836 respectively, but his business is not listed in any Yorkshire trade directories for the 1820s or 1830s, nor does he feature in the York census returns. 190 merchants who marked their bottles in a similar fashion.4 As ceramic historian Derek Askey has commented, the earthenware bottle had ‘a truly local identity’.5 Fig. 3.2, stoneware bottle6 The semi-circular stamp on the other side of the bottle, however, was the nationally recognised mark of Joseph Bourne, the founder of the now famous Denby pottery in 1812.7 The son of William Bourne, a stoneware manufacturer at Belper, close to Denby, over the next thirty-five years the success of Joseph Bourne’s business enabled him to take on two other nearby Derbyshire potteries. By 1856, Bourne had become the owner of the Shipley Pottery in 1845 and transferred its works to his 4 See Appendix 4, ‘Stonewares 1650-1900 from Hungate and Swinegate, York (from York Archaeological Trust IADB)’ for details of these bottles. 5 Derek Askey, Stoneware Bottles from Bellarmines to Ginger Beers 1500-1949, Second Edition (Barnsley, 1998), p.8. 6 YAT, Project 5000, SF158, ‘stone bottle’. 7 Askey, Stoneware Bottles, p.159. 191 Denby site in 1856.8 Likewise, in 1833 Bourne acquired the nearby Codnor Park pottery after its owner, William Burton, surrendered to financial difficulties in 1832. In 1861, Bourne transferred Codnor Park’s production to Denby.9 With Belper already part of his empire, Joseph Bourne became, in the words of Derek Askey, ‘easily the largest producer of stoneware bottles and other domestic wares’ of the nineteenth century.10 Exact figures of production are not available, but it is clear that earthenwares were produced on a large scale: a trained potter could make 2,500 pieces a week.11 Their chief trade was in ink bottles for P. & J. Arnold of London, although like many other stone bottle producers, the blacking bottle was also a stalwart of their production line.12 As discussed in chapter one, proprietary branding acted as a signifier of authenticity and as an assurance of quality for consumers. It took place through a variety of methods and was performed by multiple users: from the manufacturer through to distributor and finally retailer. As a result, objects contained branding that was attended to in varying degrees by different audiences. The marks on stone bottles make explicit this series of exchanges, a series that is often overlooked in histories of branding.13 8 Ibid., p.171. 9 Ibid., p.165. 10 Ibid., p.159. 11 Desmond Eyles, Royal Doulton 1815-1965. The Rise and Expansion of the Royal Doulton Potteries (London, 1965), p.18. 12 Ronald R. Switzer, The Bertrand Bottles. A Study of Nineteenth-Century Glass and Ceramic Containers (Washington, 1974), p.71. 13 See for example many of the contributions listed in Table 1 in the thesis introduction. See also: the contributions in Geoffrey Jones and Nicholas J. Morgan (Eds.), Adding Value. Brands and Marketing in Food and Drink (London, 1994); Ruth Herman, ‘An exercise in early modern branding’, Journal of Marketing Management 19 (2003), 709-727; the contributions in Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis and Jane C. Ginsburg (Eds.), Trade Marks and Brands. An Interdisciplinary Critique (Cambridge, 2008); 192 This ‘life history’ or ‘object biography’ methodology, in which the object is considered throughout all its stages of human interaction, is a technique familiar to anthropologists and those in other disciplines.14 Historical archaeologists are particularly adept at this, but historians are beginning to integrate such considerations into their work.15 Using such a methodology opens up nuances in the historical discussion of commodity branding, which have formerly privileged the relationship between the producer and consumer of goods. These discussions have, however, overlooked the fact that the person who filled the container did not always place these marks upon it. Equally important, yet overlooked, is the fact that some marks that represented different identities were applied at the same time. Stamps had to be placed before the bottle was fired, which meant that Wormald and Bourne’s marks were both made at the same time, in a similar fashion to the makers of glass pharmaceutical bottles. As with medicines, and as the thesis will show in chapter five with tobacco pipes, such a production process challenges the assumptions about the the contributions in Teresa Da Silva Lopes, and Paul Duguid (Eds.), Trademarks, Brands and Competitiveness (London, 2010). 14 Paul Courtney, ‘Ceramics and the history of consumption: pitfalls and prospects’, Medieval Ceramics 21 (1997), p.96. See also: Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’ in Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 3-63; Igor Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 64-91; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The cultural biography of objects’, World Archaeology 31:2 (1999), 169-178; Cornelius Holtorf, ‘Notes on the life history of a pot sherd’, Journal of Material Culture 7:1 (2002), 49-71; Harold Mytum, ‘Artefact biography as an approach to material culture: Irish gravestones as a material form of genealogy’, Journal of Irish Archaeology 12/13 (2003/2004), 111-127; Janet Hoskins, ‘Agency, biography and objects’, in Chris Tilley et al (Eds.), Handbook of Material Culture (London, 2006), 74-84; the contributions in Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Eds.), Women and Things, 1750-1950. Gendered Material Strategies (Farnham, 2009); Vesa-Pekka Herva and Risto Nurmi, ‘Beyond consumption: functionality, artifact biography, and early modernity in a European periphery’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13 (2009), 158-182; Siân Jones, ‘Negotiating authentic objects and authentic selves: beyond the deconstruction of authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010), 181-203. 15 See the contributions in C.L. White (Ed.), The Materiality of Individuality. Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (London, 2009). For a historian’s use, see: Karin Dannehl, ‘Object biographies: from production to consumption’, in Karen Harvey, History and Material Culture. A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London, 2009), 123-138. 193 ‘trustworthiness’ of marks that claimed to represent particular individuals or companies. Furthermore, although ceramic historians such as Llewelyn Jewitt and David Gaimster have examined pottery stamps in detail, this was to ascribe provenance and production dates. They did not integrate the marks into any wider history.16 Likewise, though Askey’s work demonstrates extensive research on pottery stamps, it was to merchants’ stamps that he referred when he described the ‘truly local’ nature of stone bottles. He has given precedence to the marks of the sellers of the liquids inside the bottles, rather than those of the makers of the bottles. By re-interpreting branding to include the many marks sometimes found on single objects, this chapter will integrate both marks of production (pottery stamps, such as Joseph Bourne’s) and marks of commerce (merchants’ marks, such as Edward Wormald’s). It will then go on to illustrate how on some occasions, these marks can be interpreted as both symbols of production as well as commerce. They changed, depending on their reader. As anthropologists Daniel Miller and Arjun Appadurai have noted, the context in which the mark was and is read, was and is crucial.17 Archaeologist Paul Courtney has concurred with Miller and Appadurai: ‘the same object may have different uses and meanings for different individuals or groups.’18 16 Askey, Stoneware Bottles; Llewelyn Jewitt, Ceramic Art of Great Britain. Ed. By G.A. Godden (London, 1883); David Gaimster, German Stoneware, 1200-1900. Archaeology and Cultural History. Containing a Guide to the Collections of the British Museum, Victoria & Albert and Museum of London (London, 1997). 17 Daniel Miller, Artefacts as Categories. A Study of Ceramic Variability in Central India (Cambridge, 1985); Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’. 18 Paul Courtney, ‘Ceramics and the history of consumption’, p.96. 194 This is reflected in the different marks found upon stone bottles. As this chapter will demonstrate, although Joseph Bourne’s pottery mark was a message to his customer, Edward Wormald, it was also potentially of importance to Wormald’s own customers. Knowing the quality of the container in which their product was kept – as gauged from the potters’ stamp – may have been important to those who purchased it. As we will see, for customers of liquid blacking manufacturers, these marks of production could be read as an extra mark of authenticity found upon ‘genuine’ products, such as that of Robert Warren. To create a convincing fake, counterfeiters would have had to ensure that in addition to the mark of the brewer or blacking manufacturer, that they also included the mark of the correct pottery.